1864. | Hets’s Great Meteor of 1863. 193 
There were others who supposed it to be going towards the zenith. 
Two reliable observations further afforded him the means of calcula- 
ting with some certainty, both the direction and the height. One of 
these was the observation made in the Miinster Cathedral. The large 
west window of the cathedral was suddenly lighted up, so that the 
architectural details were all rendered plainly visible, and the observer 
saw the ball pass across in an oblique direction from the right-hand 
corner. From measurement of the distance of the observer from 
the window, and the height of the window, Dr. Heis was enabled to 
calculate two points in the path of the Meteor. 
We may sum up, in a few words, the conclusions at which the 
author arrived from a careful comparison of the various observations 
which reached him. He believes that the fire-ball first became visible 
at a point in the North Sea, about 53° 50’ north latitude, and longitude 
5° east of Greenwich, at a height of 88 miles; that it travelled from 
north to south, and disappeared in latitude 51° 28’, longitude 5° 18’, at 
a height of 17 miles, having in its visible course traversed 187 miles in 
4% seconds, at the rate of 473 miles in a second. The path inclined 
towards the horizon, at an angle of 22°. 
We have said that the author himself believed that the fire-ball had 
fallen to the earth. So convinced was he of this, that he made a 
journey to the place near which he supposed it to have fallen, in order 
to search for and make inquiries after it. He wandered over the 
neighbourhood of Herzogenbusch, in the north of Flanders, for several 
days, but without success, and departed at last, disappointed indeed, 
yet still hopeful, for he left at the village schools a promise of a large 
reward for any boy who should find a meteoric-stone. 
On all sides, however, he found the impression existed that the 
Meteor had fallen in the immediate neigbourhood, and from the in- 
terval of time which elapsed between the disappearance of the light 
and the observation of the sound in this vicinity, he calculated the 
height at which it exploded. But unfortunately the ideas of the 
Belgian peasants as to length of the interval were rather vague. Several 
guessed it at five minutes, which was much too long, so the Doctor, 
in his perplexity, appealed to an intelligent cook, who both saw the 
Meteor and was frightened by the noise. In answer to the question, 
“Could she have boiled an egg hard in the interval?” she replied, 
“Lord bless me, no—not even soft !—Lord bless me, no; it could not 
have done in double the time ;” and so the interval was reduced from 
five minutes to less than one minute, which was further diminished by 
other observers to twenty-two or twenty-five seconds. 
If it were solid, and had fallen entire, there would hardly have 
been much difficulty in finding the object, for Dr. Heis has cal- 
culated that in such-a case the earth would suddenly have acquired 
a@ mountain as large as one of the Siebengebirge. The diameter of 
the fire-ball he estimates at 1,381 English feet ; but it may be, he 
remarks, that these bodies have only a small nucleus within a luminous 
envelope. 
The cosmical relations of the fire-ball of the 4th of March we must 
dismiss very briefly, The author determined that it moved around the 
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